http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1943819&fullscreen=1 Dang it, CollegeHumor. This idea had such potential: pick a random passerby, grab their BlackBerry, put’em in front of a roulette wheel, then offer them 100 bucks to send whatever fake message their luck lands them on. The catch: they only get the money if they wait 5 minutes to admit to the person on the other end that it was just a gag. Alas, a few weak prank messages and inconveniently sleeping recipients keep the video from reaching its full lols-potential. So why post it? In hopes that it inspires CollegeHumor (or someone else) to take another stab at it, to be honest. Less dumb Beatles questions, more awkward situations (Keep it light-hearted. Don’t go pranking people by telling them their pets are dead, jerks.) Make them wait a bit longer than 5 minutes — and in the mean time, offer up potential follow-up responses for bonus cash. You get the idea. [Via IntoMobile] → Read More
You can now find the Kobo Wireless e-reader on walmart.com. You can also find it in brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart stores, so it all works out. → Read More
Plista, the self-declared “preference-based advertising network” that is primarily targeted towards monetizing publishers and major outlets, is raising €2.5 million in a Series A funding from Crédit Agricole Private Equity and NWZ publishing house.
Existing backers DuMont Venture and semi-public High-Tech Gründerfonds have also participated. → Read More
MyThings, which provides personalised retargeting services, this morning announced that it has raised $6 million in their third round of funding. The financing round was led by T-Venture, Deutsche Telekom’s venture capital arm, with participation of previous backers Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, Dot Corp and GP Bullhound.
MyThings, founded in 2005, claims its technology is capable of increasing return conversion rates of online retailers by more than 500%. Its proprietary optimisation technology is currently being used by leading European retailers such as Price Minister, Republic, PIXMania, Etam and Orange, and its total reach is said to surpass 1 billion monthly impressions these days. → Read More
A new DVD release has captured the attention of the American nation. The Six Million Dollar Man, one of the first prominent science fiction-y television shows in history, is now available. The new collection, officially called The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection, includes 40 DVDs with every single episode of the show right there for you. It’s the first time the complete collection has been made available. → Read More
Duke Energy and ITOCHU Corp. announced a partnership today through which they will evaluate and test new uses for old electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Once they are too spent for life on-the-road, EV batteries could store power and deliver a charge elsewhere, the companies reason.
EV batteries falling below 80 percent of their original capacity when fully charged will be candidates for replacement and reuse. Duke and Itochu promised to begin their project by testing Ener1 lithium-ion batteries extracted from a fleet of 80 EVs in a Duke Energy facility in Indianapolis. → Read More
A report in the Financial Times suggests that Net Neutrality may, once again, be on the docket. The FCC is looking to have everything wrapped up as early as its December 15 meeting. Whether or not that actual happens—there have been several false starts, of course—who knows? → Read More
A new independent car comparison website has launched in the UK hoping to take on much more established media in the car review space.
Founded by 23 year old “car enthusiast” James Hind, Carbuzz aggregates expert reviews and ratings, along with user reviews, statistics, and additional video and images, in order to help car buyers make their next purchase based on criteria such as budget, features and taste. The site currently houses around 8,000 reviews, each categorised by model and engine type. → Read More
Almighty Giz has two exciting maps that offer an alternative explanation for the decline in cable and satellite subscriptions in the past year. If you look at the maps, you’ll find that the areas that saw the biggest drops in subscriptions are also, generally, the areas hardest hit by foreclosures. The theory goes, these areas have been hard hit by the recession, and subsequent unemployment, so they’d be first to drop superfluous things like $100+ cable TV bills. → Read More
It is as they say: the best laid plans can often go awry. Even the most heavily tested builds of iOS — ones that many thousands of iOS developers Beta tested, and ones that had multiple last minute Gold Master revisions — can have surprise bugs lurking when things go live. Such is the case with iOS 4.2, which has at least one strange bug in its bed. Upon updating to the just released software, a solid number of users are reporting that their music library has gone missing. Fear not, music lovers! There’s an easy fix. → Read More
Acer is announcing a set of five touch devices under the Iconia line including Windows 7 touch tablets and laptops as well as an Android model. Our cousins at Engadget have a liveblog going on as we speak. Apparently there will also be a tablet “app store” available for those inclined to put all their eggs in one basket. → Read More
Jokes, all jokes. The Smartfish Whirl Mini incorporates the same sort of design found in the full size model announced at CES 2010. So yeah, there’s a pivot point to allow your wrist and arm to move in a more natural movement. This time around there’s it’s packaged in a slightly smaller form factor to better accommodate traveling and for those that like smaller mice. (like me) This model ships in early December for $49.95 and is available in six different color themes. → Read More
Local reviews site Qype, which lets you review any venue from restaurants and bars to gyms and childcare, has raised a new funding round amounting to a combined 6.5 million euros to throw fuel onto its mobile business. Investors include Vodafone Ventures and existing backers. Currently the largest user-generated local review site in Europe (yes, it’s ahead of Yelp), Qype has raised 3.5 million euros from Vodafone Ventures and a further 3.0 million euros from its existing three investors, Advent Venture Partners, Partech International and Wellington Partners.
The main aspect of this deal means co-branded version of Qype’s application will be pre-loaded on supported Vodafone devices, including Blackberry and Android on handsets in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Ireland. It’s likely that Qype will do best out of pre-installation on Android devices. → Read More
Blekko, the little search engine that could, has come off the success of hitting one million search queries day and 30,000 slashtags (human curated search topics like /colleges, /vegan, /SEO) created in it’s first week of existence.
Now it has taken a unique “if you can’t beat them, join ‘em” approach to the search market and partnered up with fellow market outlier DuckDuckGo, which like Blekko, is a search engine that prides itself on having more relevant results than Google with the added bonus of not keeping any of your personally identifiable info. → Read More
We’ve been tracking the progress of Diaspora, the open-source Facebook alternative, since before the project even started. That’s because the idea got so much buzz on the crowdsourced micro-funding site Kickstarter, that they were able to turn a goal of raising $10,000 in 39 days into $200,000 from 6,500 backers in the same timeframe. But with such high expectations, you have to deliver. And many expressed doubts that the small team of college students could do that.
After the money came in, the team sequestered themselves for the Summer to work on the project. Despite some hiccups, they were able to unveil the source of the project in September to mixed reviews. Meanwhile, a user-facing alpha launch was promised for October. That came and went, and they pushed the launch to Thanksgiving. Well, we’re two days away from turkey day, and Diaspora has delivered this time. → Read More
Given the underwhelming past few years in Flock‘s history and the seemingly lukewarm post-launch response to RockMelt, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone actually wants a bunch of social networking stuff tied into their browser. So far, the browsers that pull the bigger numbers are the ones that suck the least, not the ones with the most feature bloat. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Alas, you can’t have a trendy feature without every little guy taking a swing at it. Next up with the bat? SkyFire. → Read More
What we have here is Razer‘s official Tron mouse. It certainly looks like Tron. → Read More
It is isn’t often that a web service needs almost no instructions. Minus, part of the minimalist design trend inspired by apps like Glen Murphy’s DropMocks, allows you to drag and drop photos from your desktop into your browser in order to arrange into galleries, edit and share via URL. Yes that’s all it does — Single service web apps are so hot right now.
Founders Carl Hu and John Xie want to eventually expand into documents, music video, and other files, but as of yet the Boston based service is delightfully simple, like a no frills imgur. Start your sharing! → Read More
Yeah, sure, it will come out. Don’t worry. I know you guys are totally into the Notion Ink Adam tablet and I’m here to tell you that this thing won’t ship this year and when it does you won’t be happy with it. Barring all that, the company has just released a website so you can gaze longingly at the device for a few more precious hours. → Read More
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